MEDIA TALK; A Glossy Image for Refco, at Least in the Ads

By LIA MILLER

Published: October 24, 2005

Refco, the trading company, may be in financial trouble, but its good name lives on in Trader Monthly, a magazine that glamorizes the life of financial traders.

The October-November issue has four full pages of ads for Refco, whose bankruptcy filing (the fourth-largest in United States history), coupled with the arrest of its former chief executive on securities fraud charges, has been making headlines in other publications over the past month.

In a salt-on-the-wound coincidence, the magazine's cover headline blares: ''The Greatest Trading Blowups of All Time (and What You Can Learn From Them).'' (Although not strictly a trading blowup, Refco's bankruptcy filing could fit on the magazine's list somewhere between the 1998 meltdown of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management and the billion-dollar losses of the Japanese trader Sumitomo in the mid-1990's.)

Magnus Greaves, the founder of Doubledown Media, which publishes Trader Monthly, does not expect to be paid for the ads, of course. ''The issue went to print well in advance of the unfortunate series of events over at Refco. There was not any discussion of pulling the ads. They have been a tremendous company to work with and no one could see this coming.''

Mr. Greaves knows Refco well. He sold his last company, MacFutures, a futures trading group, to Refco in 2003.

''I suppose losing a couple of ad pages versus what other people have lost in this deal, I feel funny even bringing it up,'' said Mr. Greaves.

Samir Husni, chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi and a magazine industry expert, says that when advertisers buy space in a magazine, they usually pay 30 days after publication. ''Nobody pays ahead of time,'' he said. ''You can have a contract; if you file for bankruptcy, it all becomes meaningless.'' He estimated that lost revenue for the Refco ads would amount to about $74,000.

Mr. Husni said that it had been estimated in the magazine industry that 25 percent of all ads are ''dead debt,'' meaning they are never paid for.

The timing is not great for Trader Monthly, which introduces a European edition this month. At least it has a new blowup for next year's list. LIA MILLER